Collaborating again with Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) writers David Levien and Brian Koppelman, Steven Soderbergh has made The Girlfriend Experience using high-definition video, as he did for Bubble (2005). Pornographic film star Sasha Grey plays Chelsea, a $2000-an-hour Manhattan call girl; the rest of the cast consists of nonprofessionals. We see Chelsea at work, mostly conversing […]
Monthly Archives: September 2009
A dazzling comic science-fiction fable, Akumulátor 1 is soul-mate to Gus Van Sant’s frosty satire To Die For (1995), written by Buck Henry. Both are about the destructive nature of television; however, whereas in the U.S. film people are dying—and killing—to be on T.V., in Akumulátor 1, from the Czech Republic, people are dying because […]
For three years beginning in 1818 poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, his landlady’s daughter, loved one another; his tubercular death at 25 ended their relationship “on earth.” According to the film, that relationship was chaste, and filled with romantic and sexual longing. Two things curbed it: Keats’s poverty and, later, sickness. Because it had […]
Audrey Hepburn’s best performances would remain those she gave in Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) and Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954), but I suspect that her most widely and warmly remembered one is as Holly Golightly (best actress, David di Donatello Award, Film Daily’s poll of U.S. critics nationwide), an expensive Manhattan call girl—though formerly the […]
A madcap comedy from India, in Hindi and English, 99 revolves around Sachin and Zaramud, who, indebted to a bookie, are impressed into becoming his collectors, in which capacity they have a series of misadventures in Delhi and Mumbai. The title refers to a 1999 scandal involving the fixing of a cricket match. This event […]
Dennis Grunes 